Garrison's Finish : a romance of the race course eBook

The roof fell in. A great crash and a spouting
fire of flame. An eternity, and then he emerged
like one of the three prophets from the fiery furnace.
Only he was not a Shadrach, Meshach, or Abednego.
He was not fashioned from providential asbestos.
He was vulnerable. They carried him to a near-by
house. His head had been wonderfully smashed by
the falling roof. His eyebrows and hair were left
behind in the smother of flame. He was fire-licked
from toe to heel. He was raving. But the
child was safe. And that wreck and that rescue
went down in history.

For weeks Garrison was in the hospital. It was
very like the rehearsal of a past performance.
He was completely out of his head. It was all
very like the months he put in at Bellevue in the long
ago, before he had experienced the hunger-cancer and
compromised with honesty.

And again there came nights when doctors shook their
heads and nurses looked grave; nights when it was
understood that before another dawn had come creeping
through the windows little Billy Garrison would have
crossed the Big Divide; nights when the shibboleths
of a dead-and-gone life were even fluttering on his
lips; nights when names but not identities fought
with one another for existence; fought for birth, for
supremacy, and “Sue” always won; nights
when he sat up in bed as he had sat up in Bellevue
long ago, and with tense hands and blazing eyes fought
out victory on the stretch. Horrible, horrible
nights; surcharged with the frenzy and unreality of
a nightmare.

And one of his audience who seldom left the narrow
cot was a man who had come to look for a friend among
the wreck victims; come and found him not. He
had chanced to pass Garrison’s cot. And
he had remained.

Came a night at last when stamina and hope and grit
won the long, long fight. The crisis was turned.
The demons, defeated, who had been fighting among
themselves for the possession of Garrison’s
mind, reluctantly gave it back to him. And, moreover,
they gave it back—­intact. The part
they had stolen that night in the Hoffman House was
replaced.

This restoration the doctors subsequently called by
a very learned and mysterious name. They gave
an esoteric explanation redounding greatly to the
credit of the general medical and surgical world.
It was something to the effect that the initial blow
Garrison had received had forced a piece of bone against
the brain in such a manner as to defy mere man’s
surgery. This had caused the lapse of memory.

Then had come the second blow that night of the wreck.
Where man had failed, nature had stepped in and operated
successfully. Her methods had been crude, but
effective. The unscientific blow on the head had
restored the dislodged bone to its proper place.
The medical world was highly pleased over this manifestation
of nature’s surgical skill, and appeared to
think that she had operated under its direction.
And nature never denied it.